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Big Books of the Week

Nightshade by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown) leads holds this week. LA Times interviews Connelly about his “ever-expanding creative universe.”

Other titles in demand include:

The Love Haters by Katherine Center (St. Martin’s)

Original Sin by Jake Tapper & Alex Thompson (Penguin Pr.)

The Knight and the Moth by Rachel Gillig (Orbit)

Left of Forever by Tarah DeWitt (St. Martin’s Griffin)

These books and others publishing the week of May 19, 2025, are listed in a downloadable spreadsheet.

Librarians and Booksellers Suggest

One LibraryReads and seven Indie Next picks publish this week.

Hall of Fame pick The Love Haters by Katherine Center (St. Martin’s) is also an Indie Next pick:

“While Katie goes to Key West to film Coast Guard hunk Tom ‘Hutch’ Hutcheson, trouble starts with a simple lie. A true love story about loving the person you are and those you want to love. Fantastic!”—Karen Piacentini, Fenton's Open Book, Fenton, MI

Six additional Indie Next picks publish this week:

The Girls of Good Fortune by Kristina McMorris (Sourcebooks Landmark)

“The Girls of Good Fortune takes you through the streets of Portland’s Chinatown and the Shanghai tunnels. Celie’s search for love and justice illuminates the struggles in the immigrant experience and atrocities long buried.”—Sally Sue Lavigne, The Storybook Shoppe, Bluffton, SC

Behooved by M. Stevenson (Bramble; LJ starred review)

“Come for the horse puns, stay for the very sweet enemies-to-lovers romance! This is a slow burn, low spice, but it was so charming and comforting. A read I can see myself coming back to!”—Bonnie Ingersoll, Spoke + Word Books, Milwaukie, OR

Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane (Norton; LJ starred review)

“Through Robert Macfarlane’s eyes, we see beauty in the natural world, beauty in the people devoted to protecting it, beauty in a possible future, and beauty in the words that carry its message.”—Trevor Ogden, Boulder Book Store, Boulder, CO

Left of Forever by Tarah DeWitt (St. Martin’s Griffin)

“Left of Forever is a wonderful second-chance romance about two people finally finding their way back to each other as they road trip up the western coast. If you love to yearn, you will love this.”—Kaylie Padgett, Women & Children First, Chicago, IL

Aftertaste by Daria Lavelle (S. & S.)

“A captivating and innovative debut novel that seamlessly blends food writing with the supernatural. A deliciously unique and deeply poignant narrative interwoven with themes of grief, healing, and letting go.”—Kyra Tatlow, Book Love, Plymouth, MA

The Knight and the Moth by Rachel Gillig (Orbit)

“The Knight and the Moth is haunting and mystical, tender and raw. Gillig explores devotion—both in religion and human connections, and what happens when those relationships become perverse.”—Carolyn Pallof, White Whale Bookstore, Pittsburgh, PA

In the Media

People’s book of the week is Whistle by Linwood Barclay (Morrow). Also getting attention are Spent by Alison Bechdel (Mariner; LJ starred review) and The Fate of Others: Stories by Richard Bausch (Knopf). “Great Reads by AAPI Authors” include The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong (Penguin Pr.), The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien (Norton), and Gingko Season by Naomi Xu Elegant (Norton). 

There is a summer TV preview including Prime’s The Better Sister, based on the novel by Alafair Burke, a new season of Prime’s The Summer I Turned Pretty, based on the books by Jenny Han, Netflix’s miniseries Sirens, based on the play Elemeno Pea by Molly Smith Metzler, Showtime’s Dexter: Ressurection, based on the Dexter novels by Jeff Lindsay, We Were Liars, based on the book by e. lockhart, and Disney +’s Ironheart, based on the comics by Brian Michael Bendis and Mike Deodato Jr. Plus, People online shares the best books of May.

Reviews

NYT reviews Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass; How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up by Dave Barry (S. & S.): “Class Clown, as funny books go, is a home run—albeit a shallow, wind-aided home run. Barry leans heavily on old clips of his writing to fill this book up, and that’s fine, but near the end the bag of leftovers grows soggy”; Dirty Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family by Jill Damatac (Atria: One Signal): “This is not an easy memoir, nor should it be. Damatac writes, she says, ‘to document myself into existence.’ And, as she says of some of her recipes, it will serve many”; Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li (Farrar): “Most of all, I think, it is about the solace to be derived from reading and writing, even while living in an abyss”; and two books about Sam Altman: Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI by Karen Hao (Penguin Pr.) and The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race To Invent the Future by Keach Hagey (Norton).

Washington Post reviews Circular Motion by Alex Foster (Grove): “Circular Motion comes from a writer capable of two things often misconstrued as counter to each other: deep, rich characters and elaborate, challenging ideas”; Murder in the Dollhouse: The Jennifer Dulos Story by Rich Cohen (Farrar): “So, despite the restraining orders, the bodyguards and explicit cries for help, prosecutors say Jennifer Dulos was likely killed in her own home. And the only kind of justice that will ever be served is that achieved by Cohen, who put all the pieces together to tell her story”; Awake in the Floating City by Susanna Kwan (Pantheon): “Awake in the Floating City doesn’t offer resignation, exactly, but a preemptive mourning, as if to call attention to what we are in danger of losing by showing it in the process of being irrevocably lost”; and three books on motherhood myths: Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the Twentieth Century by Hannah Zeavin (MIT), The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How To Be a Good Mom by Nancy Reddy (St. Martin’s), and Motherdom: Breaking Free of Bad Science and Good Mother Myths by Alex Bollen (Verso). 

LA Times reviews Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice To Run Again by Jake Tapper & Alex Thompson (Penguin Pr.): “Original Sin is not a compassionate account of Biden’s last campaign—at times it’s even a painful, if necessary, piece of journalism”; and The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien (Norton): “I’ve hesitated about giving away too much of the plot of The Book of Records for the same reason I don’t go on guided tours of a city I’m visiting. Thien’s book is full of unexpected moments of beauty and pleasure I don’t want to ruin for those about to enter its pages. Delight is in discovery.” The Guardian also reviews: “The Book of Records is a rich and beautiful novel. It’s serious but playful; a study of limbo and stasis that nonetheless speaks of great movement and change.”

The Guardian reviews The AI Con: How To Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want by Emily M. Bender & Alex Hanna (Harper; LJ starred review): “But reliance on AI is not just bad for artists in garrets; it’s bad for everyone, as Bender and Hanna persuasively argue.”

Briefly Noted

The Gotham Book Prize winners are announced, including Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York’s Greatest Borough by Ian Frazier (Farrar) and Movement: New York’s Long War To Take Back Its Streets from the Car by Nicole Gelinas (Empire State Editions: Fordham Univ.).

Haruki Murakami is the winner of the Center for Fiction’s Lifetime of Excellence in Fiction Award. Kirkus has the story.

Finalists for the Orwell Prizes are announced.

June’s LibraryReads list is out, featuring top pick The Listeners by Maggie Stiefvater (Viking; LJ starred review). 

CrimeReads suggests 10 new books for the week. 

People shares “7 Psychological Thrillers to Fill the White Lotus-Shaped Hole in Your Heart.”

Authors on Air

PBS NewsHour talks with Ocean Vuong about his new novel, The Emperor of Gladness (Penguin Pr.).

Jonathan Capehart, Yet Here I Am: Lessons from a Black Man’s Search for Home (Grand Central), visits Today.

Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice To Run (Penguin Pr.), will visit Jimmy Kimmel tonight and appear on CBS Mornings tomorrow.

Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House by Jonathan Allen & Amie Parnes (Morrow) has been optioned for film and television, Deadline reports.

USA Today looks at Martha Wells’s book series that inspired Apple TV+’s Murderbot streaming series.

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